May 18- Get your GUMChe On

Hey, I can't believe its already been a week since we chatted on skype! It was so good to talk! Apparently I speak English with an accent now according to Mom?...HerrrlLLo. If it is bad now, it will probably be worse when I get home..yikes. Well it was another week to be had here in the good ole land of the morning calm. I still don't exactly know what that means by the way.(Mom?) Since the English game was such a hit the first time, we took it to an entirely different part of our area and set up right in front of a high school and junior high right when school was getting out. It's such a weird thing doing this particular activity. Most of the people we talk to doing normal missionary work it takes a big effort on our part to get any sort of conversation going. But with this, the kids would walk up and you just say "Hey we're doing an English game to promote our free English class if you try you can win a choco pie", and about 8 out of every 10 kids were willing to try. This area we did it in was a lot less accustomed to seeing Americans walking around their hood so they went crazy for it. At the end of the day, we ended up with 128 numbers to send texts about English class. We're hoping this results in some new members here in the near future. Also BIG GULPS have officially made their way to K town!!! There are tons of 7 elevens here but no slurpees and no big gulps so I flipped out when I saw so many kids walking around with big gulps.

The other big thing that happened this week was zone conference. This was not like any other zone conference we've done before and by far the best one I've had on my mission. We took a hike up this famous mountain near the mission office. The top of the mountain was an ancient fortress where the King posted up at in times of war back in the 1600's. So the way it worked was we started the hike, went up a ways then sat down and received a training from President, then go up a little further and sit down for training with the AP's and then at the top we had a really awesome training with Sister Morrise followed by a testimony meeting. If you compare it to a normal zone conference, usually we get to the church at 10 AM then sit there till 12 then eat in the church then get trained while sitting in the church till 3 or 4 then finish. They're great but this was really great. I'm so thankful to have a Mission President that wants to be creative like this and make these things great opportunities to learn and grow while at the same time being refreshed and recharged. I felt so good coming out of zone conference and the days that followed. We had a few really good lessons with investigators this week. We got to meet with Brother Jeong again. He's slowly but surely progressing. Every time we meet both Elder Huffman and I feel so good after the lessons. The big problem we have with most investigators here is that we can't get them to open up and tell us what they really think about what we are teaching them, but with him he'll give us a deep thought out answer which is great and at the same time hard because everything has to click in his head before he puts his full go into it. The scriptures are slowly starting to click for him so we committed him to reading and praying every day this week. Then we met our taxi driver, Brother Park, we found a few weeks ago for the first time in a while! He lost hope in religion when his mom and brother died and then just started worshipping them. Worshipping your deceased family here is quite a common practice. He is willing to test our message though and see if it is right. He's also learning english from us which is really fun because we just pretend to be his American passengers that don't know Korean in the back of his cab and give him practice that way.

The biggest thing I learned from zone conference was this week came when one of the AP's was training us. He brought up the point that we could just flood the world with information about our church so more people had access to our basic beliefs, we could just put our pamphlets everywhere on car windows, mailboxes put it on more places on the internet. I know we do this to an extent and it's really helpful to find people who want to learn, but what he was getting at was what if we just took all the money our church puts into actual missionary work and threw it into advertising. It got me thinking of the value of sending a person to teach and testify rather than just advertising our church. The way I personally feel about this gospel is what Heavenly Father invested in me when he sent me here. It was really cool to realize that once again this week.

peace and blessins From 금천 with love. Elder Nixon